I love to taste the truth and love to talk to experts. Warning. In the class last Thursday night, studying Master Dogen's Shobo Genzo Genjo Koan, the subject of ignorance came up. And then, yesterday afternoon, it was further discussed. And today, I've been thinking about it.

[01:05]

I'm going to talk some more about what is ignorance. The Sanskrit and Pali word for ignorance is moha. Moha is sort of interchangeable with avidya, which means ignorance. Maha is delusion, vijja is ignorance, and they're somewhat interchangeable. But ignorance is more of a broad covering, whereas delusion is more specific. We have various delusions which we can identify, although delusion is also a large, broad term. it seems like with ignorance as a basis, delusions arise.

[02:11]

So really ignorance is the basis for a lack of understanding, and through lack of understanding we have delusions. So ignorance is a very important thing to understand. If we really understand what ignorance is, it helps to temper our temperament. You know, when we are confronted with delusional acts like greed, ill will, that bring a strong reaction from us.

[03:15]

If we understand that most all actions arise from ignorance as a basis, then we have a way of dealing with how things happen in the world and how we can respond rather than just reacting. So, I have some things here that I want to explain. You know, we say that the three poisonous roots are greed, ill will, and delusion. This is basic Buddhism. Greed, ill will, and delusion. Delusion is the third. So, in the Heart Sutra, the Heart Sutra says, talks about free from all perverted views.

[04:21]

Actually, you could say inverted views. But it, These, what are these, actually it's topsy-turvy views, upside-down views, which lead to, which are delusive views. So what are the delusive views? The first one is the view of, the misunderstanding of permanence as impermanence. The understanding of impermanence as permanence. The understanding of what is impermanent as permanent. And then there's the understanding of no-self as a self. And the understanding of that which is repulsive as delightful. And the understanding of what

[05:26]

Well, what is suffering is ease. So, permanence where there is no... It's not so much that we think things are permanent, but we do have the feeling that things are substantial. You know, it's logical that if you look at the way life goes, that nothing is permanent. So that's not so difficult to understand. But our attitude, we kind of give ourselves a story that the things that we treasure and go for have some substantiality. So it's not exactly permanence, but substantiality, that we think that what is unreal is real, in a sense of being substantial.

[06:41]

So nothing is substantial, and the first truth is that everything changes. Everything is continually changing. So whatever we grasp, or whatever we cling to, sooner or later dissolves in our hand. So there's really nothing that we can actually have, except for a limited time. all the people we know will eventually leave, including ourself. And the person that we were is somewhat the person that we are, but not completely. The person that we were has some influence on the person that we are. So we can see the traces of who we were in who we are, but it's not exactly the same.

[07:45]

So we create, we try to create stable and substantial situations, which is okay, we should be doing that, you know, create stable and substantial situations. But unless we are sharp enough to notice the changes and accept the changes that are always going on, we lose our footing. For instance, when we're very young, we see someone and we marry them. And we think, well, this is the way things will always be. Three years later, things are changing.

[08:49]

Five years later, they're changing. But we don't want them. We want it to be like it was when we were 21. Except that it's not like that. And so, why are you getting like this? Pretty soon, people are at each other's throats because you're not the person I married. That's right. You're now somebody else. So how am I going to relate to you as somebody else, or as who you are? That adjustment has to go on all the time. It has to go on constantly, not only with your spouse, but with your friends. And it's easier with your friends because your friends kind of adjust to you more easily because they're not binded, bound to you. But when they're suddenly bound to you, you don't want it to change. So you can accept the changes in your friends and in the world and so forth more easily.

[09:55]

So it's a constant readjustment all the time. You know, like Suzuki Roshi, one of his favorite phrases, of mine is everything is continuously falling out of balance and regaining its balance moment by moment. Everything is falling out of balance. You know, you get up and you have to regain your balance. You sit down, you have to regain your balance. You walk, you have to regain it. There's this constant change and readjustment to not only yourself but your surroundings. So, we live in this impermanent, non-repetitive world. Nothing ever repeats itself. So, as Dogen says, flowers fall with our grasping.

[10:57]

But if we appreciate the flowers falling, we can adjust and it's okay. Then, suffering in what we think is ease, in other words, we try to make our life as comfortable as possible. Even though we keep trying to make our life as comfortable as possible, we still have big problems and suffering. The problem is when we try to make our life as comfortable as possible, the more comfortable that we try to make our life, the more problems we have when things change. And then suffering comes through that change because we don't want it to be different

[12:00]

I had everything just right and fell apart. So this is delusion, delusion. These are the delusion of permanence, the delusion of ease, when really the underlying consequence of ease is suffering. So when we sit in zazen, you know, we say, Dogen says, this is the easy, this is the comfortable way. But you say, God, my legs are screaming, and you call this the comfortable way? Yes. Because we take, we accept our discomfort as well as our comfort. And within our discomfort, we know how to be comfortable. But if you just keep trying to make yourself comfortable, it's impossible. As soon as you get comfortable, it changes, and then you're uncomfortable, and then you have to change to something else.

[13:08]

And then you get comfortable, and that gets uncomfortable. And then you have to change to rearrange things. So in Zazen, we don't change to rearrange things. We find the comfort inside by adjusting We don't adjust our equipment, we adjust ourself. So you can be comfortable anywhere, in any situation, because you know how to adjust yourself, your non-self, to the situation. And you can accept a painful situation. But a painful situation is not necessarily a suffering situation. A suffering situation is when you try to get out of a painful situation. And when you try to get out of the painful situation, you create suffering because you can't get out of it.

[14:10]

So the suffering is the longing to be out of the situation. And the more longing you have to get out of the situation, the more suffering you have. We all suffer. Suffering is a great learning experience for all of us. And there are certain things that, certain situations that will cause suffering and we just can't deal with it. So that's also true. But... The attitude that we have is that we adjust to the situation rather than trying to escape from it. And the third one is the idea that there is a self where there actually is no self.

[15:15]

There are two views of our life. One is the narrow view, which is like, I was born, I lived my life, and then I died. And that's what we call our life, is in between those two events, birth and death. But it's like, if you look at a puddle, There's all this teeming life in the puddle, little squiggly things. And if you really look in a good, nice, dirty puddle, there's more life. It's all teeming, even though you may not see it all. But all that life came from someplace. And the puddle is one environment. of life, but something came from some place and entered the puddle and went someplace else.

[16:30]

So in a larger view, our coming to the puddle is what we call this life. As a matter of fact, there's a sutra that we chant at Tosahara about a puddle. What pleasure is there here in this puddle? So a bigger view of our life is that there actually is no beginning or end to our life. We have no idea, or we have idea, but we don't know. exactly how what we call our self comes into this puddle, this life, and where it goes. But we know that something doesn't just come from nowhere.

[17:31]

So there's a beginningless beginning and an endless end. And this is one phase of our total life. what we call the world. And so, and then we call being born and dying the event, the two sides of the event. But actually, in a bigger picture, there's no birth and there's no death. There's simply continuous transformation. So what we call a self is simply what this psychophysical being which is planted on this earth or which comes out of this earth. And of course, our life doesn't belong to us. It does and it doesn't.

[18:33]

So when we say I, me, and mine, we're claiming our life. with my life, I am, and so forth. This is claiming our life. But actually, that's one side. The other side is nothing belongs to us because there's no us for anything to belong to. Everything that we have is simply what we're taking care of. But we We claim objects, and we claim fame, and we claim all kinds of things, and that creates a self. All that we collect and claim is there in order to create a self, where no self actually exists. So Dogen says, the worst thing you can do is go after fame and gain, because that just creates a self, where there's no self exists.

[19:38]

And the bigger, this is also, we think that by creating a big self, that that will lead to happiness. But it always leads to unhappiness. And so we think what makes us happy is creating that self. But when we can let go of all creating the self, there's actual happiness there. True happiness. Happiness is not something that we can go after. We do with the pursuit of happiness. There's something wrong with our constitution. And it's the pursuit of happiness. It's okay, but the more you pursue it, the more it runs away because it's illusory. It's not a thing. So this is a delusion, the delusion that we can create a happiness.

[20:40]

Happiness is the result of something. When our life is harmonious and stable and Without self, happiness just arises as a natural event. But you can't make it happen. And we're always trying to make it happen. We make it happen by getting this object, and creating that object, and getting this person, and so forth. And we do have these happiness. We can be happy that way. But we should know, whatever it is that we claim it, that we take to ourselves to make us happy, will also make us unhappy, if it's not the true fundamental happiness. So, you know, when we see somebody that we love, we say, oh, I love you, you know? And we see all those wonderful things, and even the things that are ugly, we think are beautiful.

[21:46]

because our illusory mind creates this stuff. And then a few, after the honeymoon, it's like, oh, this is the person I married. And we start to see all those things that we ignored. So this goes for so much of our life. We take on these burdens thinking they'll make us happy. And we create conveniences to make life easier. But the more conveniences we have, the harder life gets. Just think about how hard our life is. We have to drive everywhere. We have to schedule our children. When I was a kid, I went to school and I came home. Now, you have to schedule, you have to drive your kids to school, you have to schedule their lives. They have all these things that they have to participate in. Life gets more and more complex.

[22:48]

And now we have the computer with more and more information. And we have to know more and more. The more we try to make things convenient for ourselves, the more inconvenient it becomes. It's total perversity. Because we think that we have to know the whole world, and then we have to know the whole universe. We're going to Mars. The moon. You know, if we want to really be content, just take care of our world around us. We're totally neglecting our world around us. In other words, in order to create wars, which make some people happy. That's true, makes them very happy. We drain all of the resources from ourselves, from the country.

[23:51]

And then the standard of living, in a true sense, keeps going down. totally perverse and deluded through ignorance, not knowing what really makes us happy. We don't know what makes us happy, so it's ignorance. And then delusions just come out of that ignorance. The delusions can't help but come out of the ignorance. And then taking delight in that which is repulsive. That's a delusion. One thing that comes to my mind is video games. And especially government video games, which promote mayhem. And the kids just get off on it. Killing, you know.

[24:55]

Kill him, kill him. That's the only word that comes out of this video game. Kill him, kill him. And the kids just get off on it. You know, we're training kids to take delight in mayhem. Total delusion. So... We think what's lovely is unlovely, or we think what's unlovely is lovely. We think that if we have big breast implants that the men will love us. Not true. Doesn't work. So we try to change ourselves in some way to make ourselves attractive, and the more attractive we will try to make ourselves, the more unattractive we become in all ways.

[26:15]

Anything we try to do just makes us uglier. We have to find the beauty in the reality. So there are four delusions, four more, that are probably the same thing. One is self-delusion, which is the lack of understanding the non-existence of Atman. Atman means a self. We think there is a self where there is no self. So the self arises with greed, it arises with ill will, and it arises through delusion. So when we get angry, we create the angry self. It just arises with anger. When we become defensive, we create the defensive self.

[27:18]

When we are not able to accept who we really are, we create the unaccepting self. When we long for something, we create the longing self. So self just arises through these roots. When there's non-greed, non-ill will, and non-delusion, a self doesn't arise. We say, well, but we still walk around, we eat, and we do all these things, right? But that is not the delusive self. That's true self. So there's, when we say self, it means ego, which is the false, so-called false self, the self that's put together. So the true self is the big self, which is your entire self in the 10 directions.

[28:32]

And when Dogen talks about delusion and enlightenment and so forth, he's talking about the delusion of yourself in the 10 directions, your enlightenment in the 10 directions. Dogen says, there are those who are totally deluded within delusion. Totally deluded within the whole universe. When the whole universe is total delusion, it's enlightenment. Because there's no... difference between delusion and enlightenment. That's hard, too. That's a wonderful koan. We can say, well, so-and-so is deluded. That's true, but they're not deluded within delusion.

[29:36]

They're not totally deluded. They're 90% deluded, not the same thing. So the monk asked Master Joshu, does the dog have the Buddha nature? He said, woo, which means no. But that's not the ordinary woo. Joshu's woo is also yes, no, in a non-dualistic way has to include its opposite. Otherwise, it's not reality. It's only one-sided. Total delusion includes enlightenment. Total enlightenment includes delusion. They're interchangeable. So, the second one is self-belief.

[30:45]

that actually believing in yourself, we should believe in ourself, right? But this means adhering to the belief in your ego as self, clinging to belief in your ego as yourself, which means that this is the cause of suffering. And then self-conceit, which is pride in the belief in our ego. There was a monk, priest, Japanese priest who came to Zen Center to check us out, you know, and to help Suzuki Roshi in the 60s. And Yoshimura Sensei, he was a really nice guy. But I remember one day he said, You know, the biggest conceit is to say, I am alive. And that really, that was a real turning word for me.

[31:49]

I never heard anything like that before. So, and it's always stuck with me. The biggest conceit is, I am alive. There is life. But to say, I am alive, is a kind of one-sided understanding. You could also say, I am dead. It would be just as correct. I'm neither dead nor alive. That's also okay. I am neither dead nor alive. That's also okay too. Who is it that's dead or alive? This is just a conceit. So then the fourth one is self-love.

[32:55]

We should love ourself. In order to love the world, you have to have some love for yourself. But self-love here is different. It's like attachment to ourself. It's somewhat narcissistic. I think what it means here is narcissism, not being able to have some freedom from yourself, to always be fawning on yourself and protecting yourself and primping yourself. over protection and giving so much attention to yourself. Dogen says to study the Buddha way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self.

[34:01]

Well, these are aspects of delusion and the causes of delusion through ignorance, not knowing who we really are, not paying attention, not going any further or deeper or investigating any further than what's on the surface. Do you have some questions? This question sort of started... You have to speak up loud and it's clear. The question sort of started last night at tea yesterday, and then we talked today, sort of brought it up again. And I guess my question is about... One of the things that you said in the beginning of the talk was the idea that it's not pain that makes us suffer. There can be pain and you can still not suffer. You can be in any situation. and not suffer, and that what has to be changed isn't necessarily the world around you.

[35:22]

What sometimes needs to be changed is what's happening within you and how you are reacting to that world. And I guess my question is just about how How do you practice with that and also with the fact that sometimes you really need to make changes? Sometimes the appropriate thing is to quit your job, to move, or to make large changes in what's happening outside. So when we make statements like this, it doesn't mean you always do it this way. It means this is the attitude. When you need to change something, well change it. But the attitude is, that you don't allow circumstances to cause you suffering. Circumstances don't cause you suffering. Suffering is your attitude towards circumstances. But we're always putting it out there and blaming it out there.

[36:23]

The world's going to pieces, you know, and so I'm suffering. The world's going to pieces and I feel the pain. My suffering comes from my response to that. Nothing in the world is making me suffer. There are conditions that contribute to my suffering. That's true. Lots of conditions that contribute to my suffering, but the way I respond is what creates my suffering. And if you need to change something, change it. It's not like everything should always stay the same. That's not what I'm saying. Mind has to be very flexible. You should read between the lines. Not try to make what's said into something concrete. Like if we say, enlightenment is da, da, da. That's not what enlightenment means.

[37:24]

That means it's a characteristic of enlightenment, because there's no way to say, this is what enlightenment is. If you say, enlightenment is this, that's not enlightenment. But if you say, enlightenment is like this, it means this is a characteristic of enlightenment. You shouldn't say, oh, I see, well, that's enlightenment. Right? Don't get caught by the words. Well, I think what her question raises for me is what I've noticed is when I blame circumstances, I'm less able to make a change. And it's when I realize that I'm part of the situation and I can alter the situation by making a change. Actually, it may even promote me to make some kind of healthy changes. I can't change this, it's like this, it's not my fault, blah, blah, blah.

[38:28]

Also, by taking responsibility for ourself, that changes the world. If you try to make changes outside, it's difficult, but by transforming yourself, taking the responsibility for yourself, that changes the world. We're always trying to fix things, you know? You get something fixed, but it's only patchwork. The true work is here. So even though you want to blame the world, even though you want to blame your friend, even though you want to blame people around you, it doesn't help. It just makes everything worse. So if someone says, you're blah, blah, blah, you say, okay, I can accept that. even though you may think, well, I'm not like that.

[39:30]

I can accept that, and then I'll investigate it. Rather than, oh, I'm not like that, blah, blah, blah. Nothing happens, but if you can accept it, you release yourself. Always take the blame, even though, I mean, accept the blame, even though you're not to blame. And then you can make things right. But the more you push away, nothing will happen. It'll just make things worse. So, because you create a resistance. But when you take it in, there's no resistance, and then something can come out of that. You right the boat. I just want to ask you about how to sort of think about this stuff on a slightly more systemic level. Like, for example, a lot of the people I spend time with right now are people who identify themselves as being sort of in the radical activist world of things.

[40:39]

And one of the reasons it's sometimes hard for me to be in that world is because I'm very, very actively working through my practice on trying to be less judgmental and more compassionate. And I have found that one of the ways that people in that world define We are the good people. We are doing the good work. They are all the bad people. But something that I hear sometimes as a resistance, like for instance, when I talk about the fact that I come here a lot, a lot of people were really surprised by this at first. And one of the reasons to be totally blunt was they would say, well, isn't everyone there just upper middle class and white and all the same? And isn't it really easy to say, you know, that we need to accept that the world's not making us suffering and it's just our reaction when we have lots of privileges and we were given a pretty easy life. Isn't it a lot harder to say that if you're, you know, living in a family of 15 in a one bedroom apartment where everyone's unemployed and miserable and has nothing to eat?

[41:45]

And if you're black, gay, in a minority, et cetera, et cetera, just sort of this idea of it's really easy to say I'm going to work on my personal transformation and that's what's the most important thing. Why not coming from a place of privilege in my personal daily life is So I don't have an answer, but that's just something I hear a lot, and I'm always trying to figure out how to respond to that. Yeah, well, divisiveness creates divisiveness. Revolution is called turning, right? That's a revolution. So the people that are on the bottom become the people on the top. Look at the communist revolution in Russia. Everyone is equal, except us. It always turns that way. Those people who are on the bottom will be on the top, and then they'll be the oppressors, and then the people on the bottom will come up and have a revolution, and they'll be the oppressors.

[42:48]

It always goes that way. I'm not saying that, you know, I totally appreciate the activists, right, because we're all activists. Also, my mother used to send me to the store, to the grocery store, to get a bone for the dog, and she put it in the soup. So I wouldn't say that I was upper middle class. To label all these people is the same, it's just totally ignorance. I don't want to talk about that, but I do want to say that we're all activists, but we're activists in different ways. Some people don't allow their rage to transform them into raging, into their opposite, actually.

[43:50]

So that's called reaction. There's this action and there's reaction. So rather than react, you step back and you respond. So response is you do something with a calm mind, which allows something more than just reaction to come up. And so those people that aren't just always reacting, that doesn't help at all. Reaction, they just have a bigger club. But if you know how to respond and work from within, It's not just your personal transformation. It's the fact that there is transformation, but your transformation affects everyone's transformation. It's not just something you do for yourself. So there are different ways to affect transformation. One is to act out of rage, and the other is to act out of a more subtle base and affect change from within rather than from without.

[44:55]

And that's the end because it's getting late.

[45:00]

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